About 86 years ago the mainline churches did something. Maybe we washed our lucky game underwear. Maybe we traded Babe Ruth. Lots of people have lots of ideas. But we have not been winning any evangelism series for a looong stretch of time.” So begins Martha Grace Reese’s whimsical yet ultimately serious effort to get us mainliners to act like the Boston Red Sox and finally break our curse.
Bryan Stone’s Evangelism after Christendom is a remarkable book that was about 30 years in the making—three decades of thinking, research, experimentation and reflection on the church in post-Christendom. A seismic shift has occurred in American church life, and we liberal mainline Protestants have been among the last to notice. In the context of our disestablishment, where many of us now feel like missionaries in the culture we once thought we owned, we have to rethink everything.